The repercussions of the Catholic Reformation for society from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century were both significant and far-reaching. Not least among its effects were the consequences for artists and architects of the deliberations on art at the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563, which reaffirmed the traditional role of art within the life of the church. Just as artists were encouraged to give visible and persuasive form to the doctrines of the church, they were also employed by the secular hierarchy to promote their aristocratic and elitist values in art, architecture, and landscape design.

Breaking with the contorted artifice of Mannerism, artists cultivated on the one hand an Academic Classicism, on the other a vital naturalism, or indeed a fusion of both, to communicate the church's vision of its own authority, the meaning of its sacraments, and the miracles, visions, and martyrdoms of its saints. Using the forms of either Classicism, naturalism, or both combined, artists tended to fuse the natural and spiritual realms into a breathtaking and seamless whole.

In representing the self, among the great range of expressions explored by artists in this period, we saw the extremes of royal identity as projected in the contrasting palaces and gardens of the two most powerful monarchs of the period, Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France. As artists also found employment among the European aristocracy, they had ample occasion to give visual form to the humanistic tastes and grand self-image of their patrons in palatial ceiling frescos, tomb memorials and portraits. Artists also received commissions from the aristocracy and others to create works for domestic contexts to give pleasure and inspire virtue.

Artists also found in the realm of nature occasion to celebrate the beauty, variety, and exotic marvels of creation in terms of vivid naturalism. Using a combination of Classicism and naturalism, they also drew inspiration from the humanistic tradition to give form to visions of rural plenitude, ordered measure, and Arcadian bliss.

Within the city of Rome, architects, sculptors and urban planners collaborated to show off Rome's ancient and modern churches, while also enriching Rome's symbolic public spaces with new buildings, fountains and obelisks. In so doing they also developed a dynamic, new spatial sensibility, whose dramatic impact parallels the persuasive effects seen in all media of Baroque art.

As Catholic missionaries followed the armies of the Spanish conquistadors to the New World, some of the most exuberant manifestations of Catholic art and architecture, as developed in Spain, were imitated and adapted in the American Southwest and the Latin American world. The result was a most creative collaboration between European designers and Native American artists. What had begun in Rome in the wake of the Council of Trent thus found its way into the desert landscape of New Mexico and the Puebla region of Mexico, powerfully shaping the religious imagination of the Latin American world.